From Building Startups in Silicon Valley to Creating a Viral YouTube Channel — John Coogan

John, good to see you again. The first time I heard about you was through the video you did on Silicon Valley - that was a fantastic video. It gave me a fantastic landscape of the history of the VC community in San Francisco. It was really, really helpful to understand how to raise funds and the happenings behind the scenes. But having said that, what got you into videos? How did you start doing videos?

I got into videos during the pandemic lockdown. I'd been an entrepreneur for about a decade across two companies, and I had free time for the first time in ten years. Basically, because nothing was going on on the weekends - there weren't any venture capital happy hours, no real social engagements, no friends or family stuff.

So I had free time. I'd just sit down on a Sunday morning and think of an idea I wanted to discuss. I would do some research, write for a few hours, then record, which took about thirty minutes, and then I'd edit for another couple of hours and I'd just put it up on YouTube. And it was really, really small, about a hundred views a video for maybe the first year. But I did everything myself, from the writing to the recording to the editing. And I got to tinker around in motion graphics and after effects. A lot of times I would just make videos for friends of mine who had questions. For example, one of my friends was raising money for a new startup and I made him a six-video series on how to raise money.

And so it was just a very fun way to get in the habit of working through an idea from start to finish and creating a thesis and trying to hone things down and also just synthesizing everything that I'd learned and everything that I'd read. That Silicon Valley history video was a good example of where everything came together from books I'd read, along with people I'd talked to. I could just really concisely explain the long-term history of Silicon Valley, which I don't think many people get when they watch the HBO show or read a TechCrunch article.

The history of Silicon Valley and what makes it so special

This goes back decades and decades and decades. Silicon Valley is really like a rainforest. It's one of the metaphors I've heard before - that it's not just that there are a lot of VCs or startups there. It's that there's also Stanford and Cal Berkeley and this education system, and there's also military and government investments from decades ago. All of these different things came together to work in perfect harmony.

Almost $25 billion was invested into the Bay Area, and New York was a distant second with roughly $4 billion, and LA was around $2 billion. Silicon Valley is in a completely different category and has been for a very long time because of its history, and because of this confluence of factors, every different moving part came together perfectly in the creation.

The original reason why we call it Silicon Valley is because that's where they were making silicon chip semiconductors. Now all the semiconductors are made in Taiwan, and we just do software. But a lot of the design and a lot of the promising new technology companies are still built in Silicon Valley. So it was very interesting to dive into that and give a bit of a bigger perspective.

That was something that was missing from YouTube in general. I really wanted to find kind of a white space. Many people were talking about the trendy news of the day, and the stuff that gets the most clicks is always the most negative. FTX, bankruptcy, SVB, Theranos, WeWork - all these negative stories were what people were focused on. If they were talking about Silicon Valley at all, I wanted to go back and talk about not only the successes but also some of the deeper history that was missing from the space.

Understanding the YouTube algorithm and how Twitter is useless for YouTube engagement

I noticed a lot of people sharing your videos over time, especially on Twitter. Did you initially use any specific growth strategies or growth hacks to get all that viewership?

No, Twitter was useless. Twitter people are upset about Twitter blocking Substack links and whatnot, but Twitter has never been a driver of YouTube views for a few reasons. Going back a few years, way before the Elon stuff, Twitter had always nuked links that deprioritized links in the algorithm that would take you off the platform - and that makes sense.

It's the same thing with LinkedIn and Instagram, all of these platforms, they don't want you to leave the app because once you leave and you go to a different app, then you're not using their app - you're not seeing their ads. That was always the case. But even if they didn't, no one wants to click on a tweet that they're kind of scrolling casually through while they're waiting in line at a restaurant to get a sandwich or something, and then watch a twenty minutes YouTube video about some topic that's super deep and has music and voiceover and graphics. You need to be much more engaged.

It's a completely different frame of mind watching a YouTube video versus engaging with a Tweet. Substack makes sense because you're already reading on Twitter - you click a link, open it up, and maybe read a bit of an article or the whole Substack article. So that flow kind of worked, but Twitter never drove YouTube views.

I only had about a thousand followers on Twitter when I started YouTube, and I quickly eclipsed that on YouTube. All the growth came from going viral in the YouTube algorithm specifically. That was a combination of high retention - people watching the videos all the way through and high click-through rates. So figuring out how to package the videos in a very broad way took a very, very long time. It was all about figuring out how to frame these stories in really broad contexts.

For example for Bolt, I was talking about Markus Villig, the guy who built the biggest ride-sharing company in Europe. The title is just Europe's Youngest Billionaire because everyone knows Europe, Young, and Billionaire - it's an interesting hook. We don't even talk about the company's name in the title because not as many people know about it. The logo is in the thumbnail but it's very broad and accessible so anyone can click on that. Finally, once they're in the video they can say, okay, I actually want to know this person's story and I want to know how they did it. So just figuring that out and how to appeal to a broad audience on YouTube led to the growth.

Using the ‘Stress Test' as a marketing tool to fuel growth in a competitive market

How did Soylent go viral? Did a lot of people in San Francisco know about it already or did you use any strategies?

Rob wrote some great viral blog posts that did really well on Hacker News. And then that got the attention. We had about ten thousand sign-ups in a day. It was very clear that this was going mega-viral, and we should focus one hundred percent of our time on this.

It was very weird - a techie guy who quit eating food - super viral. Clickbait, essentially. Then VICE News started writing about it, then Discovery - we were even on the cover of The New Yorker at one point. Rob went on the Colbert Report. It was really big, and basically, it came down to an age-old marketing tactic. We didn't know this at the time, but Ogilvy, one of the fathers of modern marketing, had this theory that if you're trying to sell, you need to do a stress test if you're trying to sell something new. So his idea was that glue is a very boring product if you're trying to sell glue. It doesn't look attractive. It's not like a car, but it's not fun to look at. And everyone wants to know - is this glue strong? So really, the way to do it is to show them a stress test.

He had this campaign for this French glue company where he took the spokesperson and he put glue on the bottom of the spokesperson's shoes and then glued them to the ceiling. This is a very high-stake scenario. If the glue doesn't work, the spokesman will fall and break their neck. And so you can't look away because it's this daring feat of high risk and it's very intense. You're watching this person who might fall at any minute and they won't prove that the glue works. And while that's happening, they're giving you the pitch on why you should buy this particular glue.

The Soylent experiment was kind of the same thing where it was like, sure, you might not trust this weird techie to make this new food, but he lived on it for thirty days - he didn't have any problems. He says he got healthier. I'll give it a try. If this person can live on it for thirty days straight, maybe I can try it for one meal. And that proved to work.

Joining Founders Fund and telling stories of the company's investments in defense technology such as Palantir, Anduril, and SpaceX

You recently joined Founders Fund, how did this come about?

Yeah, I'd done a podcast with them and I'd spoken at one of their conferences and was just kind of generally friendly with a bunch of people at the firm. We'd pitched Peter (Thiel) and we pitched the team there in the past and kind of knew some folks over there, never got aligned on investment, but was always kind of a friend of the fund. And then they were looking to do some interesting new things with video. I had built up this YouTube channel, so it seemed like a fit.

They reached out to chat about what doing something on video would look like and coming on as an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) seemed like a good fit where I could come in, build a YouTube channel, and focus on covering their companies, but just generally be an asset to the brand team broadly. And yeah, it's been really fun. It's only been a couple of months, but I've been very focused on the work they've done in defense specifically because even though I don't know much about it, it's really fun to learn about it.

Founder's Fund has been investing in defense technology for decades now. For example, Palantir was a huge success that no one talks about in the venture space. Founders Fund essentially incubated that company. Palantir is now a publicly traded, multibillion-dollar company. And then SpaceX - obviously, people don't think about it as a defense company, and it's not. But they sell to the government a lot, and they put a lot of satellites in space. Founders Fund was basically the first institutional money into the company.

Now they're doing it again with Anduril, which was incubated by Trae Stevens at Founders Fund. And the company's grown a ton, and recently they've been doing a bunch of work with the government. And so there's this interesting arc where Founders Fund has been for decades, like really one of the best defense government technology partners, but it's completely under-discussed. No one really puts two and two together, and so I thought it'd be a really interesting opportunity to tell that story on YouTube and highlight some of the stuff that they've done because it's really impressive and I think it's really important work.

However, I still haven't fully figured out how to tell that story. It's definitely a big branding project, but it's been fun making videos about Anduril, getting to know the team, and understanding how they think through things. It's a really fascinating company.

What makes Peter Thiel stand out from other investors - avoiding herd mentality and making independent decisions

You've raised money from some of the best investors in the world. What made Peter Thiel stand out to you - is it his experiences or your interactions with him?

Yeah, I mean, I think he's an incredible entrepreneur, PayPal Palantir, and a bunch of other companies. He's also built big organizations like the Founders Fund, which has been wildly successful even though it's a venture fund. I also think he's very diligent about thinking independently and avoids herd mentalities. Much of that goes back to his time at Stanford and working with René Girard, the philosopher who talks about Mimesis and Mimetic desire and how humans tend to think in these patterns and in groups. He's also very good at putting all that noise aside and making his own conclusions. He's seen so many companies - he probably has invested in, I don't know, thousands of companies. He's seen everything, and I think he's just experienced and diligent about maintaining independence in thinking through things.

John's future - entrepreneurship, venture capital, and content creation

John, last question - what should we expect from you in the future? Are you going to start another business or are you going to become a full-time investor?

Yeah, I mean, part of joining Founders Fund was that it's an opportunity to figure that out and see what I want to do. I want to continue making great content, improve the production process, and create more content regularly. That always hits my quality bar. I'm doing longer videos now and they've kind of slowed down, but I want to get back on a weekly cadence. However, with longer, bigger videos and there's a lot of other low-hanging fruit in content, whether it's like longer form stuff or shorter form stuff, you can take many different directions.

Also, it would be interesting to start another business. I'm an entrepreneur at heart and I love building stuff. I just kind of want to make sure that I pick something that's a really great market and something that is a great fit for my skill set and my audience and everything that I've done all comes together to really accelerate that. Lastly, I do angel investing and like that, but I'm not sure where that goes. I'm still kind of figuring that out.